I think this problem has now gone away on my machine.  I cannot be sure what it was that helped.  I removed all qt-* packages, and some of the problematic packages mentioned as depending on the earlier versions.  After running<br>

<br>     # emerge -utv world, I noted some dependencies, and may have removed one or two.  Then I ran the install. <br><br>After a couple of interations, all *seems* to be well.<br><br>Thank you for the advice,<br><br>Alan Davis<br>